These muffins are really something out of nothing. The ingredients are always in my cupboards and fridge and I know I can’t go wrong with this recipe. Sweet, comforting, with a little yummy sugar sprinkled on top – they disappear quickly. Storing them in the fridge brings out the best flavours from the cheese inside but they’ll be delicious in room temperature too. The more I look at these, the more I think they could play a major role in this year’s Halloween fare with some food colouring in all the right places. I’ll keep you posted anyway, as always!

In the meantime, enjoy these sweet, comforting little gems.

Ingredients:

for muffins:

2 eggs

1/4 cup rapeseed oil

1/4 cup applesauce (you can replace this with more oil if you have no applesauce)

3/4 cup milk

1/2 cup sugar

1 3/4 cup all purpose flour

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla essence

3 tsp brown sugar to top

for filling:

1/2 cup cream cheese

3 Tbsp powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

In a bowl mix eggs, oil, applesauce, milk and sugar with a whisk until smooth.

Add flour, baking powder and vanilla essence and mix roughly until there are no more streaks of flour.

In a separate, small container mix cream cheese with powdered sugar until smooth.

Fill a 12 muffin tray alternating between the muffin dough, cream cheese and top with more muffin dough.

A lot of the cheesecake recipes call for a lot of cream cheese. No wonder – it’s supposed to be cheesecake after all. This tends to get really expensive here in Norway though and to be honest, very heavy. So I came up with this, I suppose smoothie cake would probably be a better name, since it has a lot of cream and milk and just a bit of cream cheese. It’s still a delicious, stiff, cheesecakey foam with blueberries. I mean, you cannot go wrong with this. 🙂

This version is not very, very sweet, so do taste it before committing to this amount of sugar and increase if needed.

Ingredients:

3 Tbsp powdered gelatin

1/2 cup boiling water

1 cup single cream (around 20% fat)

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup milk

125g / approximately 1/2 cup cream cheese

1 cup blueberries

biscuits – just enough to cover the bottom of the tray twice

1/4 cup butter

a couple of blackberries for decoration

Mix the gelatin powder with the water from the kettle until smooth. Let it cool but keep stirring occasionally to prevent it from setting in the glass.

In a bowl of an electric mixer place cream and start beating on medium speed.

Slowly add all the sugar, milk, cream cheese and blueberries at the end.

When everything is blended, let it rest and in the meantime break up the biscuits into small pieces.

You can use a food processor.

Melt the butter (I use the microwave for that but melting it gently over the stove top is certainly a better idea).

Add butter to the biscuit crumbs and stir.

Press the biscuit – butter mixture into the bottom of your spring pan.

Once the gelatin mixture is not hot anymore pour it into the milk/cheese mix and stir with a hand whisk to distribute evenly.